Spaciotemporally Generated Microfluids: Asymmetric Flow Resistor for On-chip Pumping

In the conventional microfluidic chips, the functions of microchannels are limited due to the laminar flow environment. To overcome the limitation, we present an unpreceded concept of “spaciotemporally generated microfluids (SGMs)” which generate micro-vortices in micro channels as “walls” of pressure. Based on this concept, we developed “asymmetric flow resistors (AFRs), which have different flow resistance to bidirectional flow. In this paper, we evaluate flow resistance of AFRs and demonstrate on-chip pumping.